About this Book

The next day, Aunt Lovey placed us in the middle of the floor again. This
time she didn't put my Baby Tenderlove doll in front of the silver radiator but
Ruby's Kitty Talks a Little. And it was Ruby's turn to learn how to get what she
wanted. Ruby's challenge was greater than mine, though. According to Aunt Lovey,
it took Ruby six months to coax me across the room. Some time after that, Aunt
Lovey put my doll and Ruby's doll at separate ends of the room. A casual
observer might have thought she was being cruel, but Aunt Lovey wanted more for
us than just survival.

When Ruby and I were nine years old, Aunt Lovey drove us to the Leaford
Library to look for books about our condition. (What books did she think we
would find there? Welcome to the Wonderful World of Craniopagy?) Ruby had, and
still has, severe motion sickness. She doesn't always tolerate antinausea
medication, and more than half the time we travel, even short trips, she gets
sick. Sometimes very sick. Ruby's motion sickness has further limited our
already profoundly restricted lives. My travel bags, even for day trips, contain
several changes of clothes for us both. Under most of my travel memories is the
shaker-cheese smell of Ruby's breath.

On the way to the Leaford Library, Ruby threw up twice, and by the time we
arrived I was wearing the last of my clean clothes. Even though it was normal
for my sister to be carsick, I knew that it was more than Aunt Lovey's driving.
(The next day Ruby was covered in chicken pox, which I, incidentally, did not
get.)

Aunt Lovey had been disappointed to find that there were no books about
cranial conjoinment, or any kind of conjoinment, in the children's section
upstairs. On our way to the elevator she stopped to tell the older woman at the
desk that Leaford Library needed to look at its children's collection and
include a book or two about birth defects and whatnot. "Especially," she'd
added, "since you have a set of craniopagus twins living right here in your own
community."

The old woman, whose name tag said ROZ and who was wearing a young woman's
purple angora sweater, stared at me and my sister. Like most of Baldoon County,
she'd only heard of the rare conjoined twins. She seemed less astonished than
most people on first meeting Ruby and me. Maybe it was because she knew someone
not similarly, but equally, exceptional. She agreed that the children of Leaford
needed to be enlightened, and then she escorted us to the elevator. I felt Ruby
go limp on the quick ride down and I knew that she'd fallen asleep. I could feel
the heat from her fever and considered informing Aunt Lovey that we should go
home, but the old woman in the angora sweater had directed us to a book of
photographs (from the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia) on one of the high shelves
in the adult section. I could not leave without looking inside.

On the front of the huge book was a daguerreotype of Chang and Eng Bunker, twins
from old Siam, the original Siamese twins who were famous for doing circus
acrobatics while being joined at the chest. After entertaining the courts of
Europe, the brothers settled in North Carolina in the mid-1800s, married nontwin
sisters, and fathered a total of twenty-one children! (This is absolutely true.)
In the photograph the twins look distinguished, wearing identical dark suits
tailored to cover the band of flesh that bound them at the thorax. They lived to
be sixty-three years old. Chang died in the night of a ruptured spleen. His
brother's parting words are said to be, "I'll go now too."

Aunt Lovey carried that big picture book, and a few smaller books, to a large
quiet table at the back of the reading area. Ruby's sleeping body was heavy.
Hot. I settled down carefully on a narrow bench and held my breath as Aunt
Lovey's freckled hand (you would never have known by looking at her that my Aunt
Lovey had Native Indian blood) opened the book. The first photograph, in black
and white, was a graphic shot of a severely deformed human skeleton. Aunt Lovey
read the small print out loud"Skeleton of a seven-month-old fetus with spina
bifida and anencephaly"before she cleared her throat and turned the page. On
the next page was a photograph of a nude woman, surprising not because of her
white nakedness but because of a curvature of the spine that caused her to bend
sharply at the middle, like a walking letter r. I asked Aunt Lovey to read the
small print on that page, but she turned it instead. The next photograph was of
a middle-aged man dressed in a starched white shirt and cravat. An enormous
plum-colored tumor appeared to have frightened the man's right eye into his
forehead and chased the nose off the center of his face. I would have liked to
linger on the photo, but Aunt Lovey turned the page. There, on the next page,
against a velvet background, incredibly and spectacularly, were the pickled
remains of infant craniopagus twins, joined not at the side of the head, like
Ruby and me, but at the back of the head, so that one looked forward and one
behind. The babies were afloat in a massive glass jar, eyes wide, mouths open, a
tooth bud visible in the larger one's lower gums. Back to back. Bum to bum.
Flotsam in fluid. Tiny elements of metal visible here and there. The babies had
been posed before being sunken in the jar. They were holding hands. A sob rushed
out of Ruby's throat and startled me because I hadn't felt her wake. Aunt Lovey
slammed the book shut. Her cheeks were scarlet. She rose to return the book to
the shelf.

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